Did Border Numbers Plunge 93% in Trump's First Week? What We Know

US News Reporter

President Donald Trump has claimed that border encounters plummeted by 93 percent on his first full day in office.

Newsweek has been unable to verify the claim and has reached out to the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for confirmation.

Why It Matters

Trump made immigration a core component of his successful presidential campaign, pledging to hold the largest mass deportation event in history. Americans largely support immigration reform overall, according to recent polling, but disagree about how policies such as deportations should be carried out.

When he took office on January 20, Trump put his campaign promises into action, vowing at his inauguration that "all illegal entry will be halted" and that millions of "criminal aliens" would be deported.

Later that day, he issued a raft of executive orders related to immigration, one of which declared a national emergency at the border. He also signed a proclamation that gave officials the authority to "repel, repatriate, or remove" migrants until he was satisfied that "the invasion at the southern border has ceased."

However, it remains unclear if there has been an uptick in deportations or a decrease in crossings since Trump took office.

What To Know

In a post on Truth Social, Trump shared a graph that showed that daily encounters with undocumented migrants who were provided with no form of reparations or returned to Mexico dropped by 93 percent on his first full day in office, from 2,516 on January 19 to just 43 on January 21, when new border measures came into effect.

On January 20, when Trump took office at noon and began signing a raft of executive orders related to immigration, encounters dropped to 1,186, the graph shows.

The graph also shows that border encounters have remained low while Trump has been in office, peaking at 331 on January 27. That gives Trump a 7-day average of 148 encounters, compared to Biden's average during his final 19 days in office of 2,087, according to the graph.

Newsweek cannot verify the claim as Customs and Border Protection hasn't published data for border encounters in January as of January 29.

According to data obtained by Fox News, the number of migrants arriving at the southern border dropped by 60 percent after Trump took office last week.

In the first week following Trump's inauguration (January 20-26), there were 7,287 migrant encounters at the southern border, according to Fox News's data, including those apprehended by Border Patrol between ports of entry and by the Office of Field Operations (OFO) at official crossings—an average of 1,041 encounters per day.

By comparison, in the final week of the Biden administration (January 13-19), border authorities recorded 20,086 encounters, with a daily average of 2,869.